There are many mistakes that I see MMA athletes do every day in the gym, especially when it comes to preparing for a fight. This article comes to life from conversations with other coaches (far smarter than I) and frustration with athletes. My goal is to shed some light on common mistakes I see and offer some strength and conditioning education on the sport I love and coach. Although we can argue that there are many other mistakes, I thought these are some of the big ones that should really be addressed.

• Preparing for the demands of the Boston Marathon instead of an MMA fight

This is the single most common mistake that I see in the sport of mixed martial arts. Not only do you see this in probably every athlete at the amateur level but it is a viral infection among professional MMA fighters. Just turn on an episode of the ultimate fighter and you will see guys taking heavy hits of LSD (Long Slow Distance). In other words, these guys are going jogging along with other types of slow endurance type conditioning. This is the kiss of death for the sport of MMA. First you must realize that MMA is NOT an aerobic sport. I’m sure that’s not a shocker. But it is absolutely jaw dropping how many guys are literally conditioning for a marathon type event before a fight! MMA is an anaerobic sport with repetitive bouts of power output, hence why we will use an oxymoron “Power Endurance”, for lack of a better term. Georges St. Pierre is a perfect example of an MMA athlete training correctly for the sport. Georges’ strength coach, Jon Chaimberg, is the best in the sport and I will guarantee that you won’t see Jon giving his athletes doses of LSD.

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With 62 professional fights Brian Ebersole is no stranger to the ring, coming up in the UFC 127 as a replacement for an injured Carlos Condit. Only this time he will be showing off his new Cage Fitness logo.

That’s right Cage Fitness is now a sponsor for Brian Ebersole!!

The pound-for-pound debate has been central to the mixed martial arts world since the beginning.  The premise of it is rather simple, if every fighter weighed exactly the same weight, who would win?  In the past arguments have raged between a plethora of fighters but with the recent losses of Lyoto Machida, B.J. Penn, and Fedor Emelianenko only two fighters remain at the top of the heap: Anderson Silva and Georges St. Pierre.

Both Silva and St. Pierre have outstanding resumes.  Silva is an astounding 27-4 with a 13-fight win streak, while GSP is 20-2, winning seven straight.  Superstars are littered amongst both of their records.  The Spider has beaten greats such as Forrest Griffin, Rich Franklin, Dan Henderson, and Carlos Newton while Rush has conquered Jason Miller, Matt Hughes, BJ Penn (x2), Jon Fitch and Matt Serra.

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If you’ve been training with mma conditioning workouts for a while but you still find yourself gassing out in your training or competition, you may be making a mistake in your training  that can be fixed in 60 seconds or less.

One of the biggest but perhaps unnoticed mistakes that I’ve seen mma fighters or combat athletes make in their training is not enough attention to the time they “rest” in between sets, reps, intervals, or rounds in their mma conditioning workouts.

For example, have you ever followed someone’s mma conditioning workout, whether it be out of a book, video, coach, or magazine, and you see instructions on how long to perform each exercise as well as how long to rest in between?

Do you pay as strict attention to the time instructed to rest as you do for the time instructed to perform an exercise?

If you can honestly say yes, then pat yourself on the back. However, are you SURE you ACTUALLY rest for ONLY the time instructed in between exercises?

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I’ve spent a lot of time in the last year or two training MMA type fighters and thinking about what they should be doing. Drawing from my own experience and that of others and experimenting on the guys I train and on myself. I’ve also surveyed the landscape of what passes for strength and conditioning for most people in the MMA and Martial Arts worlds. I’m going to be frank with you about my conclusions. It’s a mixed bag with which about 10% is really excellent and leads the way for the rest. Another 10% is okay but is often stuck in so much traditionalism that they “get by” but aren’t even close to what they could be. The remaining 80% is pure junk. At best – time wasting useless and at worst downright counterproductive. Here are some of the biggest mistakes in this training.

1) No real strength work – Steve Bacarri said that what most fighters use for strength training is really just conditioning work. This couldn’t be truer. For some reason most fighters are convinced it’s bad to lift heavy things. Their sessions are all high reps clinging to old myths about strength work making you slow and muscle bound. That’s crap. In fact it limits their total physical potential in fighting as well as endurance and injury prevention. At some point technique and endurance will equal out and strength will be the missing component.

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I know a lot of people feel they can’t eat in the morning, but if they knew that was contributing to their weight problem, and to their high glucose readings, they would change. The body uses the stimulus of food to accellerate calorie burning. Since most diabetics have a problem with high blood sugar when they get up, they need to actually eat something to start their metabolic engine. If they don’t eat anything, their blood sugar will continue to climb.

Can Calorie Cycling Help Pull Off More Body Fat and Hold On To Precious Muscle?

I recently heard about something called “calorie cycling.” Apparently it’s a way to prevent weight loss plateaus and maybe burn additional body fat. Do you know anything about calorie cycling or how it works? Is this different from the zig-zag diet concept, or the same thing?  And will it help me add more lean muscle?  — Marcus (Arlington, VA)

Calorie cycling (also known as “calorie shifting” or “Zig Zag dieting”)  is an approach to eating that is intended to prevent weight or fat loss plateaus by “tricking out” your metabolism.

Calorie cycling or Zig Zag diets are not really ”diets” in the sense of something like Atkins or South Beach, but instead a method of manipulating the metabolism through varying your calorie intake day-to-day.

Many people who use it report experiencing greater overall fat loss, with less frequent weight or fat loss plateaus. It also may encourage the preservation of lean muscle mass, which is always at risk during when you restrict calories to encourage loss of body fat.

Although clinical research on the effectiveness of calorie cycling versus traditional dieting methods that utilize sustained calorie deficits is sparse, people who try it anecdotally-report good results.  However, this is an advanced fat loss technique that requires a fair amount of self-discipline to follow, as well as a willingness to measure food and count calories with a great deal of precision.

The Theory Behind Calorie Cycling

At its core,  calorie cycling tries to solve for the body’s tendency toward homeostasis — or preserving the status quo.

Losing body fat requires forcing your body into tapping your long-term stores of energy, which are packed on in subcutaneous fat (the fat below your skin.)  The only way to do this is to put yourself in a calorie-deficit. In other words, eating fewer calories than you expend each day just to keep your basic bodily functions running and fueling your activities, whether that’s working out or walking across the office.

Reduce your calories below your maintenance levels, and you’ll start to lose fat as the body goes to these sources to make up the deficit. Eat more calories than your body needs, and it will start to store the excess energy as body fat. Eat just the right amount of food, and your weight will stay the same.

Pretty simple formula: Calorie-in, calorie-out.

Why Traditional Diets Stumble: Homeostasis and Catabolism

There are two challenges, however, whenever you reduce your calories below your maintenance level for any extended period of time: catabolism and homeostasis.

Catabolism: The Enemy of Muscle

When you are in a calorie-deficit, the body doesn’t exclusively burn stored body fat to compensate for the gap. It also burns carbohydrates, and sometimes protein in the form of lean tissue.

So this means that even though you are losing scale weight and body fat, you may also be losing muscle along with it.

Muscle, unlike body fat, is metabolically-active — meaning it requires energy even at rest — so you always want to maximize it whenever possible. However, whenever you are in a calorie-deficit for any extended period of time, you will generally lose some muscle along with the fat.

Homeostasis: The Body Doesn’t Like Change!

The second issue is that eventually your body will eventually catch on that you’re eating less food than you need, and it will interpret this as a sign that it might be in for an extended period of food scarcity.  So it will start to slow down your metabolism in order to conserve energy, since it interprets your calorie deficit as a sign of “famine.”

This response is programmed into your genes from millions of years of human evolution, and is intended to help you survive in a famine. As you decrease your calories, hormones are produced that regulate metabolism and lipid oxidation (fat burning), literally slowing down how much energy your body burns.

These hormones (such as the stress hormone cortisol) present a dilemma for people who are trying to lose body fat while also preserving muscle.

Cortisol is catabolic and encourages the breakdown of lean tissue. It also tells the body to actually hold on to fat stores or even increase them when it has a chance. This is not a situation that will help you get lean. In fact, it’s pretty much a dieting death spiral.

This is why people will experience fairly dramatic weight or fat loss when first beginning a diet, but then hit a wall within a few weeks, as fat loss slows.

Part of this is because as you get closer to your “ideal” weight, the body holds on even tighter to body fat as a protection against future food scarcity (those damn genes again). But the other reason is that your brain has started to slow your metabolism down as a response to the reduction in food.

This is where the dreaded diet plateau rears it’s ugly head.

Calorie Cycling To The Rescue?

Calorie cycling tries to avoid the body’s natural tendency toward homeostasis by essentially tricking it into thinking that your not actually dieting at all.

Because total fat loss isn’t necessarily about your calories on a specific day, but rather creating a total calorie deficit over a time, it’s possible to alternate days of calorie-deficits, with days of calorie-surpluses and still lose body fat.

Even better, because you alternating higher calorie days with lower calorie days,   you may be less likely to lose lean tissue and less prone to developing fat loss plateaus. This can be especially effective if you match your higher-calorie days to the days when you are performing weight training, since your body can use the extra energy to fuel your workout and recovery.

While your initial fat loss results may be less dramatic on a calorie cycling diet than if you simply put yourself into a sustained calorie deficit, over time, cycling your calories may actually result in more total fat loss with less muscle metabolism.

Or at least that’s the theory.

There has actually been very little clinical research conducted on calorie cycling.  So you should know that going into it.

Most of the evidence around the effectiveness of calorie cycling is anecdotal, although calorie cycling devotees often swear by the results.  The main point of contention is not whether you’ll lose fat (you will if done correctly), but rather how effective it actually is tricking out your metabolism.

There may be a psychological benefit to calorie cycling that makes it more effective for certain people, as well.  Some people find calorie cycling allows them to stick to their diet more easily, because you’re  incorporating some “cheat days” into your diet. This can make the the calorie-deficits more tolerable.

Example of a Calorie Cycling Diet for Weight Loss

If you want to give calorie cycling a shot, you need to know a few things:

• How many calories you should be eating to maintain your current weight
• How many lbs of fat you want to lose during the diet
• Your workout schedule and intended intensity

Once you know these things, it’s basically just a matter of figuring out how to stagger your calories across the week to produce the necessarily cumulative deficit by the end of seven days. So let’s look at an example.

Let’s say you are a 30 year old male who weighs 180 lbs at six feet tall. You workout three times a week.

You will want to eat around 2500 calories a day (or 17,500 per week) to maintain your current weight. To lose 1 lb of fat each week, you need to create a weekly deficit of 3,500 calories (1 lb of fat contains roughly 3,500 calories) which means you need to come in at around 14,000 calories for the week (17,500 – 3,500 = 14,000 calories.)

With a traditional diet, you would either eat 500 fewer calories each day or expend an addition 500 calories each day. Over seven days, that would create a total deficit of 3500 calories, which under most circumstance would cause you to lose about a pound of fat.  So here’s what your daily calorie intake would look like:

Monday: 1998
Tuesday: 1998
Wednesday: 1998
Thursday: 1998
Friday: 1998
Saturday: 1998
Sunday: 1998

Total for week: 13,986

Your calories are the same each day, resulting in a 3500 calorie deficit at the end of the week.

However, you with calorie cycling, your calories per day would look like this:

Monday: 1998
Tuesday: 1599
Wednesday: 2398
Thursday: 1998
Friday: 1799
Saturday: 2198
Sunday: 1998

Total for the week: 13,998

You still end the week with a 3,500 calorie deficit, but you achieve that by cycling your calories up and down each day, versus keeping them steady day-over-day.

One of the nice things about this approach is that you can align the higher calorie days with your most intense workouts, and the lower calorie days with either cardio or rest days.  This can help give you more energy on the days when you need it and encourage anabolism and muscle building on the days when you are training.

How To Create Your Own Calorie Cycling Diet Plan

You can create your own calorie cycling diet plan with a calculator and a little arithmetic.

You basically take your daily target for whatever your goal is (weight loss, weight gain, or maintenance) and then add a few hundred more calories in one day, while subtracting a few hundred on another day so that over seven days you are still hitting your total cumulative calorie target.

You can come up with a number of different patterns that you can try, and then see which calorie cycling routine works best for your goals.

If this all sounds too tedious,  there are some nice tools available online to take the grunt work out of figuring out how to cycle the calories each day to get the necessary deficit at the end of the week. This tool does a good job of calculating a 7-day zig zag diet for you.

Challenges to Calorie Cycling

The biggest challenge to calorie cycling is the self-discipline it requires.

In general, you’ll want to be fairly precise about where you come in each day for this approach to work. You’ll need to count calories here. For how long depends on how good you are at gauging portions, but most people who report success with calorie cycling get pretty scientific with their calorie counting.

Using food and diet tracking tool like Sparkpeople.com, Fitday or Calorie King can take most of the monotony out of tracking your food intake, and will also let you see which patterns in your calorie cycling regimen work best for hitting your goals.

However, if counting calories is something you hate doing, then calorie cycling probably isn’t a particularly good option for you.

The appropriate MMA conditioning routine is the key to winning a battle. While physical strength, incredible stamina and deadly fighting skills help you excel in the sport, MMA trainers claim that it isn’t all about muscles.

Brute force may weaken the opponent but relying solely on physical strength and fighting skills is not enough to bring him to the ground. Mental conditioning is the missing link in winning a fight between two equally strong and skillful fighters.

Performance-enhancing mental strategies result in better focus and concentration, dominance over emotions and true confidence when confronted with the enemy. Mental MMA conditioning techniques are the key to cultivating that hard-core approach to winning. Here are some of them:

Positive Thinking

Avoid using the word “Don’t” and banish it forever from your vocabulary. Replace mantras containing negative phrases such as “Don’t strike out” or “Don’t miss the shot” with positive words and concentrate on a positive outcome while hitting your target.

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